


Until the Next Sunrise

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: All Souls Night - Loreena McKennitt (Song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24302380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: She’s come a long way from the fires.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	Until the Next Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RobberBaroness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/gifts).



She’s come a long way from the fires. The night sky is overcast, and there is little light for her to see by as she makes her way carefully along the well-trodden path with nothing to rely on but her memory. Not what it used to be, perhaps, but she takes a fierce pride in how she knows this land as surely as she knows herself. As surely as she knows every stone in the hearth around which her family – both living and dead – will sit this night, or the whorls in the wood of the table that has been in her family since childhood, with the pinched and laughing faces that could be traced in the contours of the wood.

What if, she wonders, her heart fluttering against the inside of her ribs. What if this time she allows her stubbornness to win and refuses him? What will happen then?

Perhaps this is the year that their dancing and their fires will fail, bringing on an endless winter. The Green Knight will wither and fade; no new year will come.

It’s a familiar fear.

The chill intensifies, and she shivers, touches her gnarled fingers to her chest. She wishes she could be at home, preparing her house for the dead. There is still so much to be done.

On the distant hillside, the candles and lanterns spin in intricate dances. She may not be able to see the dancers, but she can feel them, the pounding of their feet echoed in the beating of her heart. A memory of laughter lingers in her chest and in her aching cheeks as she remembers that first night, long ago, in the days when she was young and used to dance 'til dawn: the figures illuminated by fire, disguised to fool the dead. She should have been able to recognise them still; early in the evening, she could have picked out the people she knew, but all seemed strangers to her now, not quite human. They capered around her, spun hand in hand with their own shadows, and she took her place in the dance in turn. Her eyes stung and when she blinked, it seemed there were twice as many dancers than there ought to be, crude masks made monstrous by the firelight.

One caught her up by her waist and spun her around so fast the flames blurred into streaks of light, golden chains against a background of dark velvet. He spun her until she was dizzy and laughing in delight, and when he set her down, it was the rhythm’s turn to take hold, snatching her up just as he had and guiding her steps, making her twirl and stamp her feet, until she took another turn, and _he_ was in front of her. Motionless, alone of all the throng.

Her steps faltered and she froze. She stared up at him as he gazed down at her, and all the while the dancers continued to spin around them, the lantern flames blurring into streaks of light against the darkness.

He set his hands upon her hips. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, but he made a gesture – a questioning dip of his masked head – and while she must have gestured back she couldn’t remember doing so, only that her heart and her body sang out _yes_ even in the midst of her fear. Without missing a beat, he swung her back into the dance, yet it seemed, she noted, to have a subtly different rhythm, as if it was not they who were matching their steps to the dance, but the music adjusting itself to match them.

Beneath his mask his eyes caught the fire, seeming twin spots of burning orange flame. Even through her clothes she could feel how cold he was; in the close press of his body, she felt the coming winter, every frost-fall, every frozen-over pail. If she exhaled she knew she would see her own breath on the air. He was as cold as the dead.

She's reached the bridge.

The rush of the water is sounds too loud, drawing her back to the present. Her crooked hands tighten on the side of the bridge as she leans against it, grateful both for the chance to lean her weight against something and that she doesn’t need to hide her relief. Any weakness she shows is magnified a thousandfold now that she’s old, and she cannot seem to make her family see how it helps to keep working, even on the days when her body aches in protest. She keeps her house busy for similar reasons: when her children and grandchildren all bustle around her, it drowns out the ghosts, makes it easier to ignore the extra faces sitting at her table. When her house is quiet, it’s too easy to catch herself talking to someone who shouldn’t be there at all.

Gradually, her eyes adjust to the darkness. Lights glimmer in the depths of the rushing water, and they might simply be the reflections of the fires, but she knows they are not. The wind presses gently against her back like the flat of a hand, longing to follow the water as it rushes out to the sea. The voices in the water ring out more clearly, some filled with sorrow, others joyous or bargaining or pleading. They sing of the good lives they’d led, or how they’d never had a moment’s joy or peace, and amongst them are the angry restless ones, those with no loved ones to sweep the floor and lay them a place at their table.

More lights kindle, flaring bright, until the water looks like a river of dancing fire. Innumerable souls reach up towards her as they surge beneath a bridge that’s suddenly not quite so familiar any longer, and which surely any right-thinking person would avoid on this night, just as they’d avoid crossroads too, and yet here she is.

She exhales, shivering, an old woman in an ill-fitting mask and a shabby robe of rags. A mist of silvery white streams between her lips. Feeling numb and heavy, her bones filled with lead, she lifts her gaze to the hill, where the darkness is deep as velvet and the fires shine like jewels. There are people there, and people she knows, some of them her loved ones, some she brought kicking and squalling into the world herself with her own two hands, yet it seems as if they have faded to the point of non-existence, as though their essences have been poured into the candles and lanterns they hold, and it is the flames themselves that are alive, both more and less than human, and each a fragment of the sacred bonfire, dancing to keep the world turning.

He’s here.

She never hears him approach, although she feels him, every slow, studied step. Cloaked in shadow, he seems part of the night itself, his face concealed beneath a skull-shaped mask, carved, she thinks, from bone. Deep shadows pool above and below the sharp cheekbones, in the hollows of the cheeks and the eye sockets.

There is an intensity in his stance, and in how his attention is focused entirely on her. One moment she thinks him entranced, the next mocking, and surely it must be the latter, for why else would he seem so fascinated by a woman so old and bent and crooked as she, but as he holds his hand out to her and as she takes a step towards him, and then another, her costume is no longer fashioned from strips of rags, too worn-out even for cleaning cloths, but feathers of every colour couched onto the softest silk. It ripples around a body now straight-backed and moving with the lightness and ease of youth. The hand with which she takes his is smooth, with the fingers straight and slender. She cannot remember a time when her fingers were not marked by toil, cracked and red-raw, not even when she was young.

It feels different every time. Except for the fear. That never changes, how it seems to stop her breath and keep the beat of her heart in stasis as he pulls her into the dance. His hand is gloved with brushed silk, and the only spot of colour about him is the orange gleam deep in the sockets of his eyes. His hand rests intimately on the small of her back, pressing her body close to his, and even close up how she cannot see the edges of his mask nor understand how something so clever could have been wrought.

The dance is slow at first, their accompanying music the distant heartbeat of the drummers carried to them in snatches by the wind, but it grows faster, speeding up to a frantic breathless whirl, her cloak and his flying out behind them. She sees the world in snatched glimpses through the eyeholes of a mask which clings now to her face like a second skin. He guides her in a dance she doesn’t know but has carried in her heart throughout her life, with all other dances echoes of this one. She never once makes a misstep, imagining herself as one of the flames dancing on the hillside, but burning brighter than the others, as fierce as the bonfire itself. She remembers the fear, but has forgotten this: how in this moment she never, ever wants it to end.

But of course it must, and when the dance is over, she stands with her back to the side of the bridge and his hands on her waist, her breath coming quick and shallow, and her heart still racing to the rhythm of the dance.

Slowly, she reaches up and removes her mask, slipping it over her head and leaving herself exposed to those souls who might mean her harm. It crumples to the ground forgotten as his grip on her waist tightens.

It’s been a long time since a man held her close like this, and she remembers the breathless impulse of stolen kisses in the darkness. Mouth dry, she brings her hand to his cheek and he leans his face into her touch, the ridge of the cheekbone smooth against her palm. She tells herself that she can feel his mask shifting over the face beneath, and knowing at the same time that it is a lie. Boldly, she rises on tiptoe to press her lips to his mouth.

It’s nothing like kissing a living man. No lips meet hers, only bony ridges, but the hand that winds its way through her hair feels real enough, as does the tip of the tongue she feels in a probing flicker against hers. That’s warm, at least, even if he leaves a lingering chill upon her lips when he pulls away, as if she has been sucking on a shard of ice.

Wait, she wants to say, as he takes a step away, and tightens her hand around his. She doesn’t speak, but he looks back as if she did, his gaze resting upon their clasped hands, before he lifts it to meet hers. The roar of the water rises, the clamour of voices ringing out all around them, almost drowning out the quiet unspoken question inside her head.

She hesitates. Only for a second, but her other hand still rests upon the side of the bridge, keeping her anchored there. She thinks of her family, of everything still to do at home, and in that moment of hesitation, he’s gone, and nothing left but the rushing of the water beneath the bridge.

For a moment the voices sing out, and then they too are falling quiet, and with them goes the borrowed illusion of youth, and she is nothing but an old woman again, standing in a place where she ought not to be and with too much yet to be done before she can rest. And yet she lingers, resting her weight on the bridge for a few precious moments. Memories she hasn’t thought of in years return to her, of the sweet scent of straw and of stifled laughter, a warm body against hers and the sweetest pleasure, the heartache of keening for the dead, and the laughter of the Good Folk as she names each hidden face in knotted wood.

She sees herself as a whirling lantern, her soul a spark, snatched upwards on the wind. Her mouth still feels bruised by the kiss, and when she presses her fingers to her lips, she knows the sun will rise tomorrow. Knows too that they will be waiting for her at home, those who won’t be dancing until the coming sunrise, all the ones she loves and has ever loved, gathered around her hearth and waiting for her to return.

And she heads for home.


End file.
